Schools are tracking children under the guise of preventing obesity, encouraging academic achievement, and promoting fitness. Another creepy, Orwellian scheme: In early 2012, wristwatch-like devices called Polar active monitors will be used by older students in PE classes at all 18 Parkway elementary schools. District officials say the devices should help improve the students’ fitness [...]

This story is hardly surprising – it just repeats itself at a different school in a different state. In Covington, Kentucky: A new city ordinance, enacted January 2, has police taking school truancy into their own hands. If kids are caught skipping school they could now be arrested on misdemeanor charges. If their parents are [...]

The drug war insanity is teaching the publik-skooled-children all about the good deeds of the federal government and its militarized police state in their great moral case against using substances that make one feel temporarily euphoric. In case you are prone to think this is satire, this really happened. A public school in Connecticut played host [...]

We libertarians and assorted other fellow travelers of the freedom philosophy know that the one great cataclysm of the public school system is the dumbing down of children to the lowest common denominator in the name of celebrating equality and the no-winner rule. Here’s another classic example that comes much too close to being mistaken [...]

A Portland school recently banned hugging. …the principal of West Sylvan Middle School, Allison Couch, issued the ban because the hugging was so disruptive that students could not pass each other in the hallway without a hug and were often late to classes because of a lengthy embrace.  Sometimes students would run down the hall [...]

Detroit school board chief Otis Mathis admits to a “grammar problem.” When some of his emails (consisting of 3rd-grade level grammar) got out in the public, the local media nicely jumped on it. From Laura Berman’s column: He also acknowledges he has difficulty composing a coherent English sentence. Here’s a sample from an e-mail he [...]

Manuel Lora’s post on LewRockwell.com about the Department of Voluntary Coercion stating that tax laws require only “voluntary compliance” is exactly one of those things I harped on in my post about educating people in making proper distinctions, deconstructing GovernmentSpeak, defining terms, and forcing critical assessment of what is said in the media. This is the essence [...]

I can’t think of a more unconvincing opportunist, on the entire Internet, than the unreadable, lifeless, progressive-socialist butt-kisser Matthew Yglesias. I’ve never witnessed any so-called writer who can manage to blab on so incessantly and attain so little outside of pleading for the “public good” while predictably invoking recycled left-wing buzzwords and been-there-done-that reformist tripe. [...]

Robin leaves a great John Taylor Gatto quote in the comments section of my recent blog post. This one is worth repeating. This is from Gatto’s essay, “Some Reflections on the Equivalencies Between Forced Schooling and Prison.” Almost all Americans have had an intense school experience which occupied their entire youth, an experience during which [...]